In the fourteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer, who served three kings as a customs official and special envoy, virtually invented English poetry. He did so by wedding the language of common speech to metrical verse, creating a medium that could accommodate tales of courtly romance, bawdy fabliaux, astute psychological portraiture, dramatic monologues, moral allegories, and its author's astonishing learning in fields from philosophy to medicine and astrology. Chaucer's accomplishment is unequalled by any poet before Shakespeare and--in The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and...

Includes the following works: Novels--The Portrait of Dorian Gray; Plays--Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest; Writings--De Profundis, Critic as Artist, and Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Very Young; and selections from Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband, and A Woman of No Importance.

The Portable Kipling contains selections from The Jungle Books and Soldiers Three; more than twenty stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King," "The Cat that Walked by Himself," "The Eye of Allah," and the unsettling "Mary Postgate"; more than fifty poems; and three essays. The volume also includes a complete chronology and a critical introduction by Irving Howe that permits us to see the formal achievements of Kipling's work as well as to enjoy its abundant pleasures--not least of which is the sheer satisfaction of great storytelling.

The Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader magnificently represents the great voices of this era. It includes such masterworks of world literature as Pushkin's poem "The Bronze Horseman"; Gogol's "The Overcoat"; Turgenev's novel First Love; Chekhov's Uncle Vanya; Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych; and "The Grand Inquisitor" episode from Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov; plus poetry, plays, short stories, novel excerpts, and essays by such writers as Griboyedov, Pavlova, Herzen, Goncharov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Maksim Gorky. Distinguished scholar George Gibian provides an...

"Deserves to be as widely read as were the originals when they were first published."Biological Journal of the Linneas Society. Includes five chapters from The Origin of Speices, complete and unabridged; significant extracts from the works that precede and develop the theory of evolution: The Voyage of the Beagle, The Descent of Man, and The Variations of Animals and Plants; scientific papers, travel writings, letters, and a family memorial; plus a chronology and biography."

Alfred Kazin has aptly remarked that "the greatest story Jack London ever wrote was the story he lived." Newsboy, factory "work beast," gang member, hobo, sailor, Klondike argonaut, socialist crusader, war correspondent, utopian farmer, and world-famous adventurer: London is the closest thing America has had to a literary folk hero. His writing itself is concerned with nothing less than the largest questions and the grandest themes: What does it mean to be a human being in the natural world? What debts do human beings owe each other - and to all their fellow creatures? This collection places...

The American West is as varied in its inhabitants as in its landforms. Yet what has come to stand for "Western" writing is the myth of the wagon train and the lone gunman. In the Portable Wester Reader, William Kittredge has assembled stories, poems, essays, and excerpts that transcend the Western myth and explore the vast range of Western experience. With selections from more than seventy authors, and an introduction and headnotes by William Kittredge. The Portable Western Reader redefines the Western literary landscape.

The intellectual wellspring of modern political conservatism, Edmund Burke is also considered a significant figure in aesthetic theory and cultural studies. As a member of the House of Commons during the late eighteenth century, Burke shook Parliament with his powerful defense of the American Revolution and the rights of persecuted Catholics in England and Ireland; his indictment of the English rape of the Indian subcontinent; and, most famously, his denouncement of English Jacobin sympathizers during the French Revolution. The Portable Edmund Burke is the fullest one- volume...

Although the publication of Little Women in 1868 earned Louisa May Alcott tremendous popularity, for a long time she was thought of as a writer of children's stories and considered at best a minor figure in the American literary canon. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, Alcott's vast body of work is being celebrated alongside the greatest American writers, and this collection shows why. The Portable Louisa May Alcott samples the entire spectrum of Alcott's work: her novels, novellas, children's stories, sensationalist fiction, gothic tales, essays, letters, and...